Protein-rich food is a physics problem.

0:00I don't think protein consumption is a fad, but I do think it's a mistake to look at the protein situation we're in right now as a sourcing issue. It is more an industry recalibration reckoning moment for how people are thinking about the reality and future of protein consumption and demand.

0:28Welcome back to another episode of The Curious Consumer. I'm Jenna Masovitz, and today we have a special interview with Mike Messerschmidt, the CEO of Lasso. Unlike a lot of the interviews we do on this podcast that center around specific brands or products, this interview is actually centered around a process. Lasso is a food tech company developed by Harvard scientists. The company's patented fiber spinning platform uses centrifugal force. Big word that in this case essentially just means like a cotton candy machine that is able to spin together fiber, protein, and other really simple ingredients to create products without having to use any excess heat, any additives that brands normally need to use to get protein and fiber to stick together in one product.

1:13Thousands of different kinds of CPG brands could ultimately use this technology to create cleaner alternatives to existing products or even make entirely novel products using this food technology. So we're really excited about this podcast. Mike also has a really awesome history in CPG. So let's get into it. Mike, first of all, so happy to have you here. I was looking forward to this conversation. I've been looking forward to it for a while and thanks for having me. Amazing. We're so excited to have you. And let's just kick off with a little intro. What's your background and what are you doing right now?

1:50Right on. My name is Mike Messersmith. I'm the CEO of a company called Lasso Food Labs. It's coming to you live from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where our company's headquartered. Going back to the beginning, I started my career as an officer in the United States Navy, working in nuclear engineering, got aircraft carriers. Always the obvious origin story for a CPG veteran. and it's almost cliche and tried at this point, but started my career floating around on boats in the ocean for a couple of years, paid for college, didn't want to be a sea captain for a living, and I've always loved food, grocery stores, shopping.

2:27I do all the grocery shopping for my family. I am that annoying person that wants to walk down every single aisle and turn every package ever since I was young. And so I got started in my career in consumer packaged goods, First at PepsiCo, down at Frito-Lay, all the best chips, all the Cheetos and Doritos and Tostitos and everything. I was on the brand team for Doritos in one of my first jobs. Literally my favorite consumer packaged goods product. My inner 17-year-old rejoicing over getting a chance to brand and sell Doritos. And honestly, like my first start in the industry, like big companies and, you know, who have massive platforms and billion-dollar brands.

3:08And that kind of got me started at working towards smaller and more, you know, newer companies that were trying to like really create categories and create something new. So moved from there to Chobani Greek Yogurt at a time of tremendous growth in the height of the yogurt wars. Was at the Nature's Bounty Company for a while doing sports nutrition products. And then I was the first employee in the United States at Oatly. The oat milk brand was there for like over seven years, all the phases of the rocket ship, just like one of the things I'm most happy, proud of. And then for the past close to 18 months, I've been the CEO of a food technology startup here in Cambridge that is seeking to really change the way food is made and give people more of what they want and less of what they don't and try to create some really special innovation.

3:59And so that's what I'm up to these days. I'd love to talk about any of it. What an incredible background. Very well decorated in CPG. I'm really interested, and I think this will tie in later in the conversation too, it's you started in dairy and then moved to Oatley. Can you tell me a little bit about that transition? Yeah, totally. One of the craziest parts is my wife is from upstate New York. Her dad worked on a dairy farm for his entire career. And so when I was at Chobani, going home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and literally Chobani is one of the foremost darlings of the New York dairy industry.

4:34My father-in-law was so proud of me for different things. And then I went to a company whose tagline was famously, like milk but made for humans. Wow, no cow. And he just like the sideways glances I would get for the Alt Dairy affiliation was something else. And I think like those companies have a lot in common and a lot of things different. First off, credit for category creation of the Greek. I mean, one of the things I admire most about Chobani and Hamdi and the way that they built that category is he had a vision around better food. and this nutritionally dense Greek yogurt, strained yogurt product, along with other brands like Faye.

5:19And there were big incumbents like Yoplait and Danone that could have made that product, but they have their factories. They already built their big tanks and pipes, and they chose not to change until brands like Chobani came along and made them change because the market spoke and they wanted, really ignited this revolution in that dairy category of premium protein packed Greek yogurt. And I was there, it's more than a decade ago now, time flies. And I remember distinctly being in conversations when we were at Chobani of people asking, are we reaching peak protein? Have we, you know, a conversation that feels almost cliche a decade later where it's like peak, we haven't even reached the like starting gates on this thing because who would have imagined what was to come in terms of the way consumer tastes and diets and the grocery store would evolve over the last decade.

6:15And honestly, like being a part of Chobani at that time of incredible growth and transformation, you really become addicted to what challenger brands represent of companies that have a strong point of view around their purpose, their intention, their products, and then the motivation to make the industry change. Like consumers speak, and then you have this lever to really drive incredible change. And that was just something that was really special to be a part of. And then Oatly, you know, I think like it was, there was definitely an evolution there. There's so many similarities in terms of the ethos of truly this disruption category creation mindset that we had at our core.

6:57And both had strong technical scientific roots at the cores of the company. Oatly's ethos in a very Swedish Nordic mindset our company was created with the explicit belief around the exploring the impact of of the dairy industry on climate change and is there a way to create a product that is without compromise yet better for the planet and less resource intensive emitting greenhouse gases and so the sustainability mission was at the core of every choice we made at Oatly, a core of the product and why it exists, that I think also both of those resonate, you know, extraordinarily well with consumers and was a big part of our DNA.

7:40Yeah, absolutely. So can you tell me a little bit more about Lasso, what you're building now, and some of the remnants of your past work experience that are still showing up? Yeah. Yeah, I think all the success that both those companies have had, the category creation, disruption, momentum that they created, I think was rooted in that both companies created products and platforms that actually were meaningfully innovative without compromise, right? That innovation mindset is the core of what I think both of those companies have achieved incredible success behind. And then you go to shows, we saw each other at Expo West a few months ago, And I love innovation.

8:26I love going to these shows and seeing what's new, who's deeming things differently. And as I thought about what I wanted to do next after Oatly, which was truly one of the best, most rewarding, successful, gratifying experiences of my professional career, I really was obsessed with where does that innovation come from? And I think the success that with these really great breakthrough brands is people that can actually look to change the process, not just the recipe. Right. And that true innovation in consumer goods is possible, but not just by taking incremental marginal improvements to the same base.

9:08Right. And so when I got involved with Lasso at the invitation of one of our investors, first on the board and then joining into the management team, we have a team of incredibly sharp physicists, engineers who invented and patented a new piece of food technology out of a lab at Harvard. that really is the foundation for us trying to not just compete at the margins for 2 % more protein, 5 % less calories, but trying to change the curve that the food is built upon. And that's incredibly exciting for me because I think that we're in a place when you look at consumer goods in the grocery store where I don't think that anyone is walking around saying, boy, I'm so satisfied with where everything is at.

10:01Everybody, no matter your political affiliation, your economic status, can food be cleaner? Can it be more nutritious? Can it be more affordable? Can it be better for the planet? The answers to those is yes, but it's very hard to build that new food using the tools and platforms that have been abundantly available for the last 80 years. You need new solutions to actually create innovative process improvements to create the food that people want in 2026 and beyond. And so that's what we're trying to do here. It is hard work where it's a tech startup in a food world, but I've been really excited about what we've been building.

10:46And And honestly, for me, the creativity and reward of trying to create better food, more nutritious, cleaner label, different textures, accessing different new ingredients is incredibly exciting because there's no absence of innovative, creative spirit amongst food entrepreneurs. Even big companies, big CPG companies want to change. they're lacking the tools oftentimes to meaningfully affect that change. Such a great point and I completely agree. I see so much enthusiasm around the idea of changing the food system, but it gets poured into creating new products and not new tech. And that's always been interesting to me.

11:31And it sounds like that is what fueled this pivot for you because it is a pivot. We think of these things as all one world, but CPG is vastly different from food tech and those communities, for lack of a better term, aren't always speaking to each other also. So can you, yeah, tell me about what is Lasso? What is the tech that we're dealing with? And how did you first get involved? Yeah. So what the platform is, our founders created a machine that you could imagine is almost like an industrial cotton candy spinner. So if most, when you walk around Expo West and you look at lots of categories in the store, a lot of food is used using extrusion processing, which is think of like, for lack of a better term, an industrial Play-Doh press.

12:14You're putting a whole bunch of ingredients into a tube, you're using temperature, pressure, and kind of like forcing it together. Typically, within those ingredients, that means you need binding agents to hold your ingredients together. You're needing sugars, gums, binders, oils, fats to hold the nutritional content together. What we've created is something that in we create a a mix of protein and fibers, our machine spins at an incredibly high rate of speed and we're actually weaving together nutritional content into a dietary fiber matrix. So the fiber is the train that carries the nutritional payload of the protein and other nutritional content.

12:58And so you're replacing this like food chemistry with food physics of weaving things together so you're able to create incredible nutritional content, high protein, high fiber foods with very clean label because we're able to avoid oftentimes the necessity of these binding agents and really extraordinary texture rather than like kind of like homogenous sausage style consistency. And so it is a small footprint, high throughput, patented machine. And for me, we didn't have to build new factories to do it. We have co-manufacturers that we plug the machine into and we're trying to create that base to think about what could we make with this that would benefit from high nutrition, you know, high protein, high fiber, clean label foods.

13:48And that's started us down the path of looking at snack foods, nutrition bars, fruit snacks, even down in like consumer pet food. Like what are the categories that would really benefit from this type of innovation? And that's what we're working on all the time. It's so incredible. So what are the inputs then? Because I know there's protein and fiber, but what is that? We are not an ingredient company. We are completely agnostic on the ingredient side. And so we start with a mix of protein and fiber. It usually comes in a powdered format. We mix it together. Think like a cake mix that then you add some water.

14:24So you create a liquid mix that then gets spun in our machine. The mix is usually a combination of fiber, oat fiber, any sort of dietary fiber that people want, plus protein. We can use any protein source from whey protein to plant-based sources to really novel proteins. We think that's really important. And then the machine operates at a gentle, like ambient room temperature processing. So you avoid some of the high temperature, high heat processing that can really ruin some of the nutritional content, flavors, et cetera. One of the things we've also explored is that the fiber from a technical kind of like structural level is the encapsulation around this, these protein inside, but it can also be other things besides protein.

15:12Cause when you look at the space of food, protein, I think is like, we're in a era of protein maxing, but also people want other things. They might want vitamins. They might want collagen. They might want gut health. There's lots of things in there that our fiber spinning system and our lasso spin tech, can create this encapsulation capability as a vessel for the delivery of high value nutritional ingredients like proteins. And so in an era where you walk around the grocery store and it's protein everything, how do I get more protein? How do I get more fiber into these foods? And they're really lacking the tools to do that in a meaningful way without having to resort to just more kind of cramming things in.

16:00usually at the expense of sensory experience, taste, clean ingredient deck, etc. Okay, so if those, the inputs can be varied, it sounds like, which is really exciting. Then walk me through what some of the outputs are so far. Yeah, so we started, the company started, and our first application was in plant-based meat. The company was founded in 2020 when the peak of the alt-protein craze, where the founders were looking at the companies and the products that were really catching all the momentum in the heat at the time and said, boy, I think the technology that we built might be able to do that better for the same reasons that exist today.

16:38Could we do a lot of the critiques that have existed around the alt protein kind of center plate protein space have been, boy, there's, I like it, but the texture consistency is a little bit off. Or why is the ingredient deck so complicated? Why is there so much sodium or kind of flavor maskers in this? So could the original thesis for the company in our first application was, can you create using proteins and fiber, a fiber structure that looks like animal proteins, but without with less ingredients, less sodium cleaner label. From there, that was the original thesis that they kind of built. Obviously, that market has been tricky.

17:18By the time there's lots of companies that have built incredible businesses there. But in 2026, tough from an investment standpoint, tough from a customer consumer standpoint, I was on the board and I said, boy, I think this machine is incredible. What you guys have done. The world needs more food platform process tech to build things. But when I look at this, it's not a plant-based meat machine. What you have is this protein fiber, like nutrition creation machine. So let's look at what other categories are fundamentally changing with consumer habits and what people want. And I was experienced a lot of those changes myself.

17:58Like my diet has changed over the past 10 or 15 years, looking for more protein, looking for more fiber. I'm not the only one that experiences that. And sometimes that gets poo-pooed of, oh, is this a fad? Is it a craze? It's like people's, they have more information and there's authentic reasons for why they're trying to change their diets like that. And so we started first looking at snack food and could we do a high protein, high fiber, really crunchy, salty snack chip product. We have a ton of parents on our team who are constantly thinking about what do I throw into the back seat of my car on a commute at 4 p.m.

18:37that I can bridge my seven-year-old till dinner. Something that they'll actually eat but has a little bit of protein, a little bit of fiber in it. So we made a really cool fruit snack product. And then on deck, we've got some jerky stuff. Meat snacks is crazy right now. We're looking at a high-protein cracker that we're really excited about, which we think is really cool. And the brands that we've created are conceptual ideas that we're selling through TikTok, we're selling through our website, intentionally trying to keep them pretty focused with the goal being that like, I want to help other companies make products on our machine.

19:14We are not trying to beat the big CPG companies. We're trying to help them. And so that's been the work that we've been doing over the past year of like expanding the aperture of the applications, snacking into other spaces, and then starting to bring on, which has been going really well, some really like blue chip, amazing companies who are equally trying to figure out how they get more protein fiber into their foods, but lacking the tools to do so. And we're trying to help them with that. Amazing. Yeah. And I've tried two of the products. Yeah. Crunch Club and Froobies. Crunch Club is like the chip basically.

19:49And Froobies is the fruit snack and they're both amazing, incredible products. I think this is like an interesting thing that just people might not necessarily know much about, I'm still learning about too, when food tech brands are building their own brands as a way to showcase how the tech works, but also are serving as B2B technology. So can you tell me about what that split looks like? Do you intend for Lasso to be a brand builder or is it going to actually probably be more of a B2B tech? Yeah. First off, I would just say building breakthrough consumer brands is really hard. There's no entrepreneur that's ever started a brand that you always hope for the best is going to be a 50 million, a hundred million dollar brand.

20:31We're gonna have all these exits, but you never know. It's hard to do these things. And so what the way we approach it is we ha with new technology, we have to create our own brands to show the world what is possible with new tech, the texture, the macros we can achieve. And why is it different? Because you're trying to get people to change. Making food brands is difficult, but it is easy just to go to what the established paradigm is and be like, give me that. That's what private label manufacturers are for and Comans are for. The easiest path on this is not to do something new. It is to just go to the status quo.

21:08And so we believe that by launching our own brands, A, it allows us to get great feedback, work through all the process, scale-up kinks of making sure we're ready for prime time. It also showcases what is possible with this technology. And those conversations at shows like Expo West, where we show our fruit snacks or we show our chips. Yeah, I like showing them to buyers at a retail store. The more compelling conversations for us oftentimes are people that are already in that category. And they're like, ooh, this is different. How did you guys do this? And then that is a segue for us to say, yeah, we're launching these, but I don't necessarily need to take this to 10 ,000 points of distribution.

21:51nationwide. I would love to let you do that. You have a better factory, a better sales team. I've been at companies where we built the best sales team ever with supply chains and factories. What we want to do with this company is let you do what you're great at and use this tech to create something new in market under this brand that you've already developed. And so our view is launch brands on our own that are illustrative examples of what the technology is capable of. We use them to de-risk the process, the capabilities, and jump into partnerships with companies to be able to use that tech to make those things for themselves.

22:31And in that you get a business that's a mix of own brand, pretty focused D2C, like traditional brand P &L with a B2B licensing, like high margin piece on the other side. I would say also you have a lot of investors and different people and people starting companies. My background was always in consumer fund consumer food investment. It's tricky. We have to tap into different sorts of investment profiles for something like this. There's lots of great consumer funds that want to find the brand that is killing it at Air One and get in early, give them a$3 million check and go from 500 doors to five.

23:08That playbook is amazing. For us, it's a tricky balance of we're in the consumer space, but typically we're looking for technology focused investors, which we're a scrappy food technology startup in an era of AI and other things. And so we're trying finding those partners that really believe in the possibility of where food is going, how it's fundamentally changing, and that you're going to need new technological solutions to be able to tap into that. And that there's a great opportunity in that, which has been a journey for us and pretty exciting. Yeah, absolutely. And definitely I hear you on the positioning of that can be challenging.

23:46Yeah, it's tricky. I want to go back a little bit to the tech because I've been sitting here thinking like all of these brands want something like this so badly. They know that the consumer is looking for clean label. They know they're looking for high protein, high fiber. Have they attempted to do something similarly in house? And why has no one succeeded before this in creating tech like this? Yeah, it's a tough, I think, like asymmetry of the pressures you feel inside a company. There's incredibly talented engineers, R &D specialists. They have great resources, the best factories in the world.

24:21Yet oftentimes you're under so much pressure for throughput, optimization, etc. that you're lacking the internal capital focus, etc. for true creation. You can innovate incrementally internally, but if you're looking to add new capabilities, you need to look outside the walls of your company. And so our startup culture started from a multidisciplinary lab at Harvard where they were doing lots of different things. They're doing textiles, they're doing biopharma, and they invented this machine. Not necessarily imagining that they were going to make protein chips someday, But like thinking about the capabilities of high throughput, being able to manipulate these like dry, raw material ingredients and really creating like magic from a formulation standpoint.

25:09Whether you're the scrappiest entrepreneur or you're the largest food international CPG conglomerate, there's no shortage of desire for the change. What you're like what both I think confront the reality of is that when you're an entrepreneur You get started by going to a co-manufacturer and they say I want to make a granola bar Or I want to make a fruit snack and they say great Here's the machine that we have and you plug it in and the truth is that a lot of the food is all made on the same machines This is why it tastes a little bit different. Yeah On the periphery you can innovate on things yet it's all flowing through the same pipes of these machines that are at the co-manufactures.

25:51And so we look at our company and we reflect that, am I as good and polished as these machines that have been running in their factories for the past 40 years in terms of the number of hours? No, we are below the curve on that. However, the output of what we can create and the consumer desirability of it, protein, fiber, clean label is significantly above the curve. And so the work that we do is finding partners who are willing to invest with us to bring ours up, work around how we integrate it in. That's the promise of if it works, it has the potential to create something that didn't exist before.

26:29And we think that customers are willing to pay for it. Absolutely. I'm interested to go back also to just the protein source conversation a little bit. We alluded to the whey protein shortage. I have written about the whey protein shortage. I know, I've enjoyed reading those, yeah. Lots of thoughts there. And the products that you've created so far, Crunch Club and Froobies are both plant protein, but it sounds like you are very open to pivoting into animal-based proteins as well when you're using Lasso's technology. Can you tell me about, first of all, I'm interested in how you guys are viewing the whey protein shortage and this being a potential solution or workaround?

27:08And two, are there ideological mismatches sometimes that come up when you are dealing with both plant protein and animal protein? Yeah, I think that first off, I mean, the whey situation that we're seeing in the market today is something I heard about that was coming last year from talking to manufacturers and suppliers in the industry who used to be able to buy containers of whey at a certain price. And now it was, the question went from like, at what price can I even get it? And you could see these kind of like slow motion challenges coming on the horizon. And now it's going to market and like, gosh, like the price of whey protein is up, I think 50 % since January.